When Dean Boxall was a boy he had his heart plucked from his chest by a professional wrestler.

“The Ultimate Warrior – I just loved him,” the zany Olympic swim coach says of the charismatic, mega-intense American wrestling star of the 1980s and ’90s.

“When I was swimming for Brisbane State High School at the GPS titles I told my mates I was the Ultimate Warrior. They told the State High crowd and they started chanting ‘We’ve got the Ultimate Warrior.’

“It was just his energy. My brother and I were wrestling nuts. One time he was fighting the Honky Tonk Man and no one knew who the Warrior was.

“The music started and he came running in, jumped off the rope, clotheslined him, won the match and just ran off. That was the Ultimate Warrior.”

It’s almost three decades since Boxall left school but the Warrior spirit still bubbles within.

The Shy Guy and the Showman

The coach in charge of a string of Paris Olympic medal hopes including Ariarne Titmus, Mollie O’Callaghan and Shayna Jack created headlines around the world in the last Olympics in Tokyo when he celebrated Titmus’s stunning 400m win over pool queen Katie Ledecky by ripping off his Covid mask, repeatedly punching the air, roaring like a tiger, then aiming a couple of spring-loaded pelvic thrusts at no one in particular.

With his curly, blond locks bouncing back and forth amid the mayhem, Boxall looked like a free-spirited, surfer boy-style coach doing what free-spirited surfer boys do.

But there was more to this story. The wider world never knew it at the time but there are two Boxalls – the shy guy and the showman.

The two constantly wrestle with each other and, almost always, the shy guy wins.

Training sessions at Boxall’s St Peters Western base in the Brisbane suburb of Indooroopilly are strictly private. Boxall media interviews, lively and engaging as they are, are extremely rare events.

It’s almost as if Boxall fears if he does start talking, the showman he is will be stirred by the occasion and give away too much for the best interests of the shy guy he is as well.

When the chains do snap and his inner Warrior storms on stage like it did in Tokyo and at last year’s world titles in Fukuoka, the coach makes no apologies for showing us something out of the Boxall.

He knows he has to be who he is and fully expects the lid to pop off his bubbling saucepan next week in Paris.

“Look, it will be what it is with energy at the Olympics. If they are winning, mate, I could easily let loose again. These guys have bled. We have cried together throughout the years.

Boxall knows that not everyone on pool deck loves his exuberant ways.

“There are a couple of (foreign) coaches who I am close with and they are really nice. But there are some others who I don’t think get me but the funny thing is they are loud too.

“If I hear they don’t like me it’s good (because it fires him up).”

Eyes everywhere

At the Tokyo Olympics, Boxall admits he was driven to the point of obsession. His game plan for Titmus to roll Ledecky was a three-year masterpiece of meticulous research which combined modern data with old-fashioned use of a coach’s most precious assets – his eyes.

Even as the common sports fan and occasional swim watcher saw him as “the crazy guy in the stands” the success of his plan cemented his reputation as one of the shrewdest, most forensic coaches of any sport in Australia.

He picked apart Ledecky’s times with the forensic obsession of a wartime code breaker but also did simple things like watch her at breakfast or on a shuttle bus to get a feel of the real person.

There were times in the lead-up when he would pace hallways at 2am questioning himself and his plans.

This time he feels more controlled … for the moment.

“Some people were sending me things on purpose to get me going. Laurie Lawrence would text me and say, ‘Katie Ledecky is the Olympic champion – your girl isn’t’ and he knew I would be like this …’’

At this point in the interview Boxall clenches his teeth and looks like a father who’s just been told his daughter won’t make the grade at school.

“Laurie was trying to keep me focused. I was way more obsessed with Tokyo. I feel like I have learnt from that and I have improved as a coach and person.”

The emotional toll

Among the most delicate challenges faced by Boxall in Paris will be negotiating the women’s 200m freestyle, where his bluebloods O’Callaghan and Titmus race each other.

Somehow he must give each a game plan to beat the other.

Only the swimmers and Boxall would know how this works but what is certain is that each swimmer has taken a different motivational route to Paris.

“Mollie has not won so she is ruthless. She’s dogged. Arnie has won before and you have to be more hungry than your first. You can get like a domestic cat at home … comfortable, getting stroked by your owner, having Whiskas

The challenge for Boxall with such a large team is he knows his swimmers will drag him to all ends of the emotional spectrum as they did in Tokyo where he celebrated the stratospheric high of Titmus while comforting a shattered Elijah Winnington who finished seventh in the 400m final despite being the world No.1.

“I shed tears with him (Elijah). I shed tears with Arnie. You have been together on this roller coaster ride. The question is whether you put your seatbelt on. If you do, you buckle up and ride it all the way to the end.

“There will be ups and downs but because we buckled in together we will do it together. There is something so powerful when it is we not me.

“Honestly, it’s just a roller coaster. It’s highs. It’s lows. You just keep moving.

“I cried with Elijah in Tokyo. But he has come back and he is fighting and hungry. He has seen what Arnie has done. They are good friends. They are helping each other through.”

Boxall also played the agony uncle when another one of his swimmers, Shayna Jack had to serve a 24-month ban for a doping offence he insists she did not commit.

“She is very close to me because of what she went through. I have always believed in her. This is her moment. That last Olympics was taken away from her because of this complete and absolute rubbish.

“I know 100 per cent she was innocent. She is ready (for Paris). She is in the zone. She is so competitive. When the pressure is at its greatest she gets the most out of herself.”

For all of his showmanship, Boxall’s career has also featured times when the maverick has morphed into a monk.

In the early 2000s, during his four-year term in Qatar when he was junior development coach then national coach, he phoned home just three times – once when his father Edwin remarried, once when his brother’s wife had a baby, and another time when organising his mother to come to Slovakia for his wedding to Andrea, a native of that country.

“I was just switched on. Locked in. I never picked up a text book. I never studied anything. I just made mistakes and just tried to get to learn my craft. I look back and I think I made a lot of mistakes but geez I learned.”

Tough upbringing behind Ultimate Warrior

Boxall is South African-born and moved to Australia at age seven. His father was a technical engineer who worked for Channel 7 from 1984 to 2006 and his mother Sally a swim teacher.

Boxall once quipped, “I was thrown in the pool at two months old in South Africa. My mum looked up and I was swimming.”

Sally recently said her most prominent memory of her son was his inexhaustible energy (what’s changed?) which meant he often seemed to be running into things at rapid pace and hitting his head, a fact Boxall does not dispute.

“I remember two days out from the Western Province championships splitting my head and getting 14 stitches. I just swam with a double cap on. My mother is a tough South African. One thing I will always be grateful for is incredible, unconditional love. We were never mollycoddled.

“I am very proud of being an Australian citizen because that was my dad’s vision but I am also proud of my South African heritage.”

Boxall’s passion is the key to everything he does but even he knows the pistons cannot pump forever. He needs a bushfire blazing within to be at his best. Stoking smouldering embers are just not his go.

“I will need to re-evaluate how long I will go for. I will keep going until I cannot provide that amount of energy again then I will have to call it a day. I cannot keep going like this. I will need a big break. I will need to re-evaluate how I build my energy up in pursuit of Los Angeles (2028 Olympics). That doesn’t bother me. I can rise again.”

Ultimate warriors always do.

■ The Paris Olympics begin July 27